Archive for the ‘Monster Sighting’ Category

Jonathon Bright, a paranormal investigator who’s started adding ‘Monster Hunter’ to his resume – because who WOULDN’T want ‘Monster Hunter’ on their resume – has started sharing a photo that might be the famous camera-shy creature that has become legendary.

“Three years ago, I came to Scotland to investigate the Nessie legend and took thousands of photographs. It took me six months to look at them all and I found this one which I showed when I spoke at the Scottish Paranormal Festival in Stirling this week. After I had finished there, I came north to spend more time searching for an answer to the Nessie story. My picture is a talking point. Some people will say it is physical and the monster, others will say it is a trick of the water, others will say it is a hoax.”

It would be great if this was in fact the mysterious animal that everyone says lives in the Loch.

It would be even greater if a professional photographer with ninja-like focusing skills and a decent camera would add “Monster Hunter’ to their resume.

Recently a company called Legend Tracker, that’s created an augmented reality adventure application, put out a call for video submissions to anyone who had footage of what they thought might be everyone’s favorite, but annoyingly elusive, cryptid…Bigfoot.

They’ve done this before…but this time, after sifting through hundreds of submissions, two crazy videos have come out on top.

The first video is from a couple hiking in the area of Mission, British Columbia. While shooting some scenery, they noticed something moving on a hilltop nearby. Is it bigfoot, Rob Zombie on a nature walk or just a feral Kardashian?

That first video is your typical “I spotted Bigfoot!” video…however…the video below, shot by a group of tourists, is probably the weirdest video of an alleged sasquatch because we’re not sure what’s going on in it.

It was sent in as a submission for Bigfoot footage but it looks more like someone’s drunk, hairy, mountain-man uncle who just dropped his moonshine jug or possibly Chaka from the original Land of the Lost. At the end of the video the alleged bigfoot appears to threaten or make a move toward the tourist because everyone starts running around like frightened Muppets. This video was also shot in the Mission, British Columbia area.

Russia has become a hotbed of Yeti activity over the last couple of weeks. And what’s more awesome than seeing a Yeti?

Seeing a group of Yeti.

In those last couple of weeks the sightings of Bigfoot’s Siberian cousin, two have included multiple Yeti hanging out together.

Sighting #1:

“We shouted, ‘Do you need help?’ They rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making their way through the bushes and with two other limbs, straight up the hill. The person who made the report added: “It could not be bears, as the bear walks on all fours, and they ran on two. Then they were gone.”

Sighting #2:

“We saw some tall animals looking like people. Our binoculars were broken and did not let us see them sharply. We waved at the animals but they did not respond, then quickly ran back into the forest, walking on two legs. We realized that they were not in dark clothes but covered by dark fur. They did walk like people.”

Sighting #3:

A forestry inspector reported seeing a yeti in a national park, a government official said. Sergei Adlyakov, the inspector who reported the incident said: “The creature did not look like a bear and quickly disappeared after breaking some branches off the bushes.”

Are Yeti growing in number? Have they just gotten numb to the whole ‘being spotted’ thing? Only one man may know the answer because he’s Russia’s Yeti expert. Igor Burtsev is the head of the International Center of Hominology and is very excited to learn more about the recent blossoming of Yeti activity. Burtsev also claims that there is an active population of about 30 of the creatures living in the Kemerovo region of Russia.

He said: “We have good evidence of the yeti living in our region, and we have heard convincing details from experts elsewhere in Russia and in the U.S. and Canada.

There’s no shortage of explanations for the demise of the newspaper industry. Could one more be the complete lack of face to face confrontation with paranormal creatures like zombies?

We at Weird Things lament the days when a brassy gal like Inez Wallace would leap feet first into adventure and track down an actual zombie and find out the supernatural and scientific explanations.

Check out these excerpts from her May 3rd, 1942 column in the Milwaukee Sentinel:

Although I rode a short distance each day into the mountains, I had practically given up hope of ever seeing a Zombie.

Then, one sultry afternoon, I was riding slowly toward Haiti’s capital when I saw HIM. Or, perhaps, I should say IT.

He was standing at a spot where a cane and a cocoa plantation met – just standing.

What did this creature look like you ask?

His face was neither the bronze of the Jamaican Negro nor the ebony black of the Haitian I had come to know in these mountains. The color was a sickly gray – like fresh Russian caviar and his skin, drawn tight over his bones, resemble old parchment.

The young teenagers were playing by the waterfront in a Panama lake near Cerro Azul when the bald beast emerged from a cave behind a waterfall. They started screaming as it shuffled out “as if to attack them”.

Locals told Panama news the monster was like “Gollum from Lord of the Rings”…

But in a “desperate bid to defend themselves” four children grabbed rocks from the beach and hurled them at the beast.

After offing the beast, the children threw the body in the water and confessed to their parents what they’d seen. The carcass of crazy creature was later found picked apart by buzzards. Like, really, picked apart considering only bleached bones remain of what looks to be a completely intact, if waterfall dwelling, Gollum.

We might never get to examine this anomaly in a laboratory but at least those Central American youths had the times of their lives beating a rare creature to death before carelessly tossing it into a lake.

For decades, the Nain Rouge leap-frogged one disaster to the next, always arriving in time to pre-empt tragedy with some goggle-eyed nose thumbing before evaporating into the high drone of an emergency broadcast signal, and for decades, from one disaster to the next, Detroit marshaled and rallied and summoned hope up out of the ashes and bones of the city’s past. In July of 1967, everything changed.

What should have a been a routine raid on an illegal bar turned into a five day riot that ended with the deployment of National Guard and U.S. Army troops. Fueled by festering racial tensions that were only exacerbated when the Detroit police, a source of friction to begin with, started making mass arrests, the riot surprised the entire country – urban living statistics coming out of Detroit portrayed it as a diverse, racially integrated wonderland. (Ultimately, the fault didn’t lie in the numbers, but in rampant, unquantified everyday prejudice, including frequent racially based mistreatment of consumers by local merchants.) In the wake of the confrontation, which was supposedly preceded by several chortling visits from the hyperactive Nain Rouge, even the most adept statistician couldn’t argue with the 43 deaths, 467 reported injuries, 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 immolated buildings.

Like a wounded, shell-shocked Veteran, the city never fully recovered. The crime rate skyrocketed in the 1970s and the town’s social fabric unraveled. Through much of the decline, the cheeky red gnome didn’t issue so much as a somber Bronx cheer.
For more than two and half centuries, the Nain Rouge seemed conjoined to the city, genetically tethered to it by a thin band of fiction, sharing whatever municipal organ secretes narrative dopamine in the wake of urban injury. But it’s hard to define the identity, the personhood, of a city. It lives in constant symbiosis with its citizens and the culture they mold and consume and re-mold, defining the place as it, in turn, defines them. The Nain Rouge was an identifying aspect of Detroit since its founding, a lodestone of a socio-cultural foundation that many believe to have crumbled in 1967.

After the riots, local and state government banded together to form a committee meant to revitalize – to redefine – the city. In defiance of history, they called the group “New Detroit.” In the last three decades, only a single Nain Rouge sighting has been reported.

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Sam Malone on Cheers and Al Swearengen on Deadwood both manipulated the politics of an entire town from behind the counter of a bar. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:“Bigfoot is blurry.”

South Park, Episode 1×03, “Volcano”

The Six Million Dollar Man, Episodes 3×16 and 3×17, “The Secret of Bigfoot”

Bigfoot has always occupied a unique place in the pantheon of American cryptids. And I use “American” very deliberately here to suggest that, while sasquatches and yetis and abominable snowmen are found (and feared) the world over, Bigfoot is a specifically American cultural institution. Even the name “Bigfoot,” a simple, almost cute, descriptive moniker, suggests what ultimately seems to be the larger mystery that Americans wrestle with when they ponder the elusive, hirsute giant. It isn’t “Is he fact or fiction?,” but rather “Is he friend or foe?”

Both South Park and The Six Million Dollar man mused upon this question. One employed the query in revealing larger truths about pop culture’s grip on folklore. The other simply provided an answer… a weird, ridiculous answer.